celebrity

A Holiday Tradition that Just Won’t Die

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One sign of success is leaving your mark on society, making an impact; being famous brings you out of the anonymous masses and bestows celebrity, a status that affords you to an afterlife that most will never achieve; individual biographies of lives lived are more compelling than questions of postmortem judgment or the possibility of reincarnation—these lists of the dead convey profound lessons about what counts in life to the living in twenty-first century America. And nothing teaches a profound moral lesson like a corpse.

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By His Wounds We Have Already Been Entertained: Tiger Woods, The Masters, and the Ritual of Celebrity Disgrace

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Why did the chairman of golf’s most prestigious tournament have the temerity to violate the Great Public Ritual of Celebrity Disgrace by publicly castigating Tiger Woods just as he was headed for redemption? Did Woods’ socially-proscribed moral transgressions simply provide Golf’s Old Guard a perfect opportunity to reassert who should be in and who should be out?

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Michael Jackson, Perfect “God” for the Media Age

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Was Michael Jackson a supernatural magician or an icon of self-immolation? Both? The physical body is gone, the musical productivity has ceased, the capacity to speak for himself is no more, so now MJ is a wonderfully ambiguous figment of our imagination. Three religion scholars discuss the life, legend, meaning, and myth of one of the world’s most talented, successful, and perhaps tortured performers.

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